InfoWorld’s David Linthicum recently wrote about how enterprise IT departments must think differently before when rolling out cloud applications. The reason? IT staffs tend to be reactive by nature, and there’s too much to lose by rolling out a cloud solution and then scrambling to make it work. He writes: “… if internal IT does not change around the usage of most cloud services, enterprise IT won’t get the full benefits.”

Linthicum goes on to identify two rules all organizations should follow before incorporating cloud applications: preparation and planning. Organizations, and their IT departments, should prepare before rolling out applications, so that IT can be at least 90 percent productive after launching a cloud app; Secondly, IT should work cloud strategy into their planning, instead of incorporating the cloud as an afterthought.

Earlier this week, Nissan confirmed a network hack that comprised both employee names and encrypted passwords. Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times covered the news, citing the commentary of Nissan spokesperson David Reuter and Shawn Henry, former FBI cyber-cop. Perlroth reported that Nissan tracked the hacks back to an IP address, but according to Reuter:

“Hackers can bounce things off servers all over the world, so the entry I.P. address is not necessarily where the hack originates. The trail goes cold pretty quickly.”

The difficulty in tracing intruders is further augmented by the sheer volume of attacks: Continue reading →

Wrong:

http://youtu.be/kuOj-Ssf4y8

Right:

http://youtu.be/arQmNjWsTz0

So, you’ve found the cloud application of your dreams.  It does everything you ever thought you could want and ten things you didn’t know you wanted but now can’t imagine living without.  It took less than 13 seconds to fully configure, and after rolling it out you found that several users had placed pictures of your IT team on their desk next to pictures of their kids and spouses. You feel pretty good about your purchase.

Then it happens…

At 3:30 ET your helpdesk starts lighting up. Your cloud app is serving error pages intermittently and 20 minutes later, the app goes down completely. Users are asking you for answers, the vendor’s support page is silent and after sitting on hold for 20 minutes, a tech tells you that they hope to have more information soon. Eight hours later, you get a form email telling you that the service is partially up, but your users’ data won’t be available for another 8 hours. Continue reading →

Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan story today on the Utah Department of Health security breach that exposed approximately 280,000 Social Security numbers highlights a point we’ve written about many times in the past: Weak, easy-to-guess passwords are perhaps the biggest threat to IT security. According to Vijayan:

“ … the hackers — believed to be from Eastern Europe — exploited a configuration error at the authentication layer of the server hosting the compromised data, according to Utah IT officials. Continue reading →

In a post this morning on Fast Company, I reflect on the management lessons I’ve learned since leaving salesforce.com to start Okta. Building and running a successful company, as a CEO, takes a completely different set of skills than running an engineering team. Have a look, and be sure to head over to Fast Company to read the full article:

Before I left salesforce.com to start Okta, CEO Marc Benioff gave me some advice. He said, “Todd, to be a great CEO, you’ll need to learn how to be a great leader, not just a great manager.”

At that time, I didn’t think much of that suggestion. But over the past three years in founding and growing my own company, I keep coming back to those words and have found them to be hugely valuable. What I’ve learned–and I suppose what Marc was trying to tell me–is that building a successful company takes an entirely different combination of skills than I was used to showcasing as the head of engineering.

When you’re running a large department in a growing company, you flex your management muscle all the time. You are constantly pushing your team and making sure that everyone is focused on the right priorities, that deadlines are hit and that together your group is functioning like a well-oiled machine. What I learned–almost immediately–is that being a CEO utilizes a totally different muscle combination than what I was accustomed to at salesforce.com. Continue reading →

Last week, we talked about the some of the challenges associated with the use of consumer mobile devices in business. This week we wanted to dig a little deeper into what exactly these challenges are. In a recent post for TechTarget, Michelle Boisvert outlines where the security risks come into play with BYOD and how they require a strong cloud strategy:

The Challenges

• Malware security: App store security is a growing concern among IT departments as users will download and access apps on both corporate and personal mobile devices. Continue reading →

As more and more IT services get shifted to the cloud, the demand for talent becomes an increasingly important issue. In an article for CIO, Meredith Levinson describes the challenges facing CIOs in finding employees. Levinson cites data from Wanted Analytics that found from February 2011 to 2012 there was a 99 percent increase in job ads for IT professionals requiring cloud computing skills.

Lack of skilled staff to support cloud services can result in some major issues and setbacks. Continue reading →

In a recent article for the Wall Street Journal, Shara Tibken addresses enterprise tablet adoption and its impact on IT networks.

“Companies everywhere are adopting tablets,” Tibken writes. “Forrester Research Inc. estimates that about 25% of computers used for work globally are tablets and smartphones, not PCs.” Continue reading →

At Okta, we’ve gone through many iterations of using Jenkins to build and test our software. We use a number of tools to make sure our code works properly, and we like to have Jenkins manage these. The list would be familiar to anyone using the Java environment; PMD, Cobertura, unit and functional tests with JUnit, Selenium tests with testNG, and also some more exotic tools like BURP Security scanner, MogoTest, and SLAMD.

We quickly found that manually installing and configuring Jenkins when we needed a new server for a given task or a special project, or rebuilding an existing server which had crashed or been eaten by Amazon was incredibly time-consuming and error-prone. We implemented a simple way of managing the Jenkins server configuration and job configurations for a given instance with code. I’m going to walk through the approach we took (simplified a bit) as an example of how to do this. Continue reading →

If you had any doubts that the shift to the cloud is now, read Aaron Ricadela’s post on Businessweek. The headline, “Oracle Losing Ground as More Business Look to the Cloud,” pretty much says it all.

“I don’t want to do plumbing,” is how Robert Schmid, CIO at video game maker Activision, explains his preference for cloud-based apps as opposed to on-premises software, for Salesforce.com instead of Oracle.

As Ricadela’s article points out, Activision certainly isn’t alone. Companies large and small are leaving Oracle in droves. Increasingly, the software giant just can’t vie for corporate hearts and minds (and dollars). And though Oracle is still turning a profit, the projected 3 percent revenue increases last quarter is Oracle’s lowest figure in the past couple of years — and that decline shows no signs of letting up.

This isn’t new to small and midsized businesses, many of which simply couldn’t afford the expensive upfront investment, protracted implementations, consultants and extensive IT staffs necessary to manage software from legacy providers such as Oracle.

And while Oracle’s business still dwarfs Salesforce.com’s, the writing is on the wall: Don’t doubt that the future’s in the cloud.